


noise in a vacuum (the gazes back remix)

by Odaigahara



Series: discord, i'm howling at the moon [8]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Blackmail, Breaking and Entering, Logic | Logan Sanders Angst, M/M, Remix, Telepathic Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 20:28:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29088354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Odaigahara/pseuds/Odaigahara
Summary: Silence came easily to Logan. He felt no need to speak to himself or enter conversations he didn’t understand, and had found throughout middle school that his preferred brand of interaction was undesirable for others. Outside of himself, it was simpler not to speak at all unless necessary for school or an extracurricular, and then to let himself drift into his mind, finishing tasks promptly and absorbing new information once he was free to do so. Teachers usually found him well-behaved.He had to wonder if that habitual quiet had made its way into his soulmate bond. Was Logan only white noise to his soulmate’s perception, too uninteresting to catch their figurative eye? Would their attention be beneficial or detrimental, once they saw the content of his thoughts, how much of him there was beneath the surface--But that was overdramatic. There wasn’t much of Logan beneath the surface. He was studious, a hard worker, intelligent; any being who could be encompassed by four or five adjectives was by definition not very deep.It was not surprising that his soulmate had yet to respond, despite Logan’s increasingly insistent prodding.
Relationships: Deceit | Janus Sanders/Logic | Logan Sanders
Series: discord, i'm howling at the moon [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1884838
Comments: 17
Kudos: 74
Collections: TSS Fanworks Collective, TSS Fanworks Collective Discord: January Remix Challenge!





	noise in a vacuum (the gazes back remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [a silent abyss](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26776921) by [amybri2002](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amybri2002/pseuds/amybri2002). 
  * In response to a prompt by [amybri2002](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amybri2002/pseuds/amybri2002) in the [tss_fanworks_collective_discord_january_remix_challenge](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/tss_fanworks_collective_discord_january_remix_challenge) collection. 



> TW's at end notes! And thank you to alicat54c for beta reading.
> 
> A remix for amybri2002's "a silent abyss", which is awesome and you should go read it, it packs a punch.

Apollo 13 launched from the Kennedy Space Center in April of 1970, intending to be the third manned mission to land on the surface of Earth’s moon. They failed, in the end-- had to return to the Earth or risk running out of resources after their oxygen tanks exploded-- but Logan grew up reading Space Race mission logs, imagining himself an astronaut or a physicist, so tense with bright bubbling ambition that he thought it must have glowed through his skin. 

He used to correct his classmates when they recited  _ Houston, we have a problem,  _ in play or as a simple phrase. That wasn’t what they’d said, he insisted. The real words were  _ okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here,  _ and then  _ we’ve had a problem.  _ They were incorrect. Their games were incorrect, they were being lazy, they were being  _ wrong-- _

In retrospect, it was no surprise that by the beginning of high school, Logan had never had a single friend.

*

Logan’s soulmate thought at angles. This was the first thing he knew about them, before their name or their age or their opinion on string theory: that their mind worked at interaction like Logan’s did at stoichiometry, considering strategies brick by figurative brick, unit by metric unit, until they found one that fit. 

Logan sat at his usual table in the cafeteria, surrounded by other mathletes and their argumentative conversation, and felt his soulmate pick away at an issue in his mind. 

It was a novel experience. Before that day, Logan had been under the impression that he didn’t have a soulmate. His classmates had been kind enough to inform him all throughout middle school of the same, once their bonds had started to coalesce and Logan had informed them that his hadn’t done the same. Logan’s mind was that of a robot, he was a brown noser and a teacher’s pet, he didn’t have friends because he never knew when to shut the fuck up when someone else was talking, never knew when no one was interested. 

More than once, he had started talking and found himself with a helpless twist in his chest as his acquaintances’ eyes dropped away, interest flagging like a low tide in the gravity of some other moon. Fascinating, to see how his soulmate didn’t receive the same treatment. Logan poked at the questionable mashed potato-like substance on his lunch tray and let his eyes unfocus to see more clearly.

His soulmate was speaking to a girl Logan’s age, he thought. Exhorting her to reconsider her lack of participation in a school play, to audition for the part of lead actress. His soulmate’s mind catalogued the minute twitches of her face and hands, the posture of her shoulders, the position of her feet, and extrapolated her current mental state. His soulmate knew what to say to receive a positive response. 

Logan had no idea how to communicate with them in return. Lunch period ended before he could come to a conclusion-- Logan felt a bitter twinge at yet another lunch passed without him saying a single word, or even being acknowledged by his so-called friend group-- and he passed the rest of the school day in mute contemplation, not raising his hand once in class. 

No one commented on that, either.

*

The beginning of a soulmate bond was always thready.

Research showed that most telepathic bonds formed between the ages of ten and eighteen, twenty percent within the same state, sixty percent within the same country, eighty percent within the same continent. Reports uniformly claimed that they were one-sided or unnoticed at first, until some inciting incident-- some extreme of emotion, or physical injury-- brought it to their soulmate’s attention. Only ten percent of humans had no soulmate at all. Some had two, or three. A sparse 0.2 percent of individuals with one telepathic bond turned out to have  _ four  _ they had to meet before their bond resolved. 

Logan received bits and pieces of communication like radio signals from another star, background radiation that provided no insight as to its meaning. Most were words:  _ that _ and  _ why _ and  _ green _ and  _ fucking hot _ ,  _ what are you talking about _ and a memorable  _ was it blood on your face or mud on your face or both, I don’t remember. _ A few were images, soft at the edges like they’d been conjured up without a reference: faces, poses, outfits. Some were snippets of tone or too abstract for the senses, concepts that floated into Logan’s mind like they’d been conceived there, instead. Once he was a landmark at the edge of town, one he was vaguely familiar with; the knowledge that his soulmate lived relatively nearby was inexplicably comforting.

No one ever talked to him, outside of being called upon in class. His parents worked late or were often away, and he had learned young not to attempt to engage them in his interests. Being called upon to work as part of an in-class project came as a surprise when it occurred, but even then his amount of speech was minimal. Logan explained what they would do, what minuscule parts the others would have to do, then did the entire project anyway and made backups for when one of his groupmates inevitably did nothing. Communication never occurred.

Silence came easily to Logan. He felt no need to speak to himself or enter conversations he didn’t understand, and had found throughout middle school that his preferred brand of interaction was undesirable for others. Outside of himself, it was simpler not to speak at all unless necessary for school or an extracurricular, and then to let himself drift into his mind, finishing tasks promptly and absorbing new information once he was free to do so. Teachers usually found him well-behaved.

He had to wonder if that habitual quiet had made its way into his soulmate bond. Were his thoughts accustomed to being stifled, to the point where they didn’t project even when Logan wished them to? Was Logan only white noise to his soulmate’s perception, too uninteresting to catch their figurative eye? Would their attention be beneficial or detrimental, once they saw the content of his thoughts, how much of him there was beneath the surface--

But that was overdramatic. There wasn’t much of Logan beneath the surface. He was studious, a hard worker, intelligent; any being who could be encompassed by four or five adjectives was by definition not very deep. An old classmate had once even called him a cardboard cutout.

It was not surprising that his soulmate had yet to respond, despite Logan’s increasingly insistent prodding.

_ Hello? Are you there? My name is Logan. I am your soulmate and my name is Logan, I am fascinated by the opportunity to meet you-- _

“Hey,” someone said in front of him, and Logan’s head jerked up, thoughts dissolving. Lucy Ramirez-- two seats to the left in Pre-Calculus, four behind and one to the right in US History, in the back center in Language and Composition, in group projects with Logan four times and always to be relied upon to bring scissors or a poster board-- blinked at him brightly, hoop earrings glinting in the fluorescent light of the cafeteria. “You wanna go out with me?”

Logan stared, mind gone uncharacteristically blank. It was as though static had descended on his mind, obscuring every possible response, because he had never thought to account for this possibility. An acquaintance was-- expressing interest, perhaps of a romantic or sexual nature, and he didn’t even know her, how was he meant to  _ respond-- _

Lucy frowned, drawing back, brushing hair out of her face. “It’s Oreo,” she said pityingly. “Sorry.”

She left before he could say anything, returning to her usual table to a chorus of giggles and conversation. Logan caught two separate glances in his direction and focused his attention on his homework, something hot and dull twisting in his chest.

He didn’t know what she’d  _ meant _ . Oreos were a foodstuff, a type of chocolate-flavored cookie, colloquially known as junk; he couldn’t fathom what it had to do with pretending courtship of strangers.

Lucy’s table contained six girls, all dressed in bright colors with sleek hair, mild to moderate acne, key chains on their backpacks that jangled when they walked. They wore Converse and charm bracelets, lip gloss and cheap hair dye. They chatted and laughed, leaning in close to each other to look at phone screens, and their every interaction was a reminder of Logan’s inadequacy.

There was something wrong with him. He knew from experience and experimentation, from the reactions of everyone he’d ever met and his inability to understand why they had acted the ways they did: there was a vast gray wall between Logan and the rest of humanity, an insurmountable gulf of understanding, an undercurrent he could neither add to nor pick up. His classmates spoke of trysts, parties, sleepovers, secrets, and Logan  _ couldn’t understand  _ how they received the information, or even how they came to be involved. He never had.

He wanted to; he had attempted to make friends and become included in conversation, but even that task had proved too much for him. Other teenagers looked at him blankly when he spoke, or considered him a resource and nothing more. They glanced at each other and said simple things, inconsequential things, but there was always more to it that Logan couldn’t see. 

It was as if everyone had joined a group chat he was excluded from, and communicated with references to it when they weren’t speaking on that invisible wavelength to leave him out entirely. As if Logan had been dropped into existence from a lesser plane and told to catch up.

He  _ couldn’t _ catch up. But when he was leaving the cafeteria, he found at the doorway-- oddly significant,  _ why  _ were doorways significant-- that he knew what the game  _ Oreo _ was after all, a game where friends dared friends to ask out the most mortifying person imaginable, and went to his locker with a taste in his mouth like he’d swallowed a battery.

*

Logan woke in the middle of the night to a rush of anxious, foreign thoughts boiling up from behind his own, shot through with bile and recrimination. The accompanying mental impressions forced him out of bed, tripping over his comforter and running into his desk chair before finally falling to his knees: it was more emotion than Logan had  _ ever  _ felt, a hot choking horror and hatred that brought tears to his eyes. 

_ God that bastard that fucking bastard he can’t, I’ve worked so hard and he’ll ruin it all, I didn’t  _ have  _ a choice I can’t stop here I’m so close, this is all I’ve ever wanted-- _

_ What, what is it,  _ Logan tried to ask, but his soulmate’s horrified mumble continued, harsh as barbed wire dragging through Logan’s brain, a nightmare of internal bleeding. His breath stuttered and twisted in his lungs.  _ Please focus please focus focus stop this-- _

_ I didn’t think he hated me this much, he’s supposed to be a teacher,  _ and Logan froze, hands over his mouth, trying vainly to stop his heaving sobs. If his parents heard, they would think something was wrong. 

Something  _ was  _ wrong. 

His soulmate’s thoughts got louder, more cluttered, a panoply of solutions running through their-- through  _ his--  _ head.  _ I can convince him not to, I can prove I wrote the essay on the blog as well, I can make an argument that it’s not plagiarism just because I didn’t write it for the assignment originally, I can delete the blog and-- no he said he had backups-- I can comply with his demands but I will  _ not  _ comply, I will not, I am not some stupid little  _ victim--

Logan rushed to the bathroom and heaved, overcome by sick, vindictive nausea, but couldn’t throw up. It wasn’t his nausea. It was not his fear, either, but in times of great stress a soulmate bond could transmit emotion as well as thoughts. 

_ This is a time of great stress,  _ Logan thought, half-hysterical,  _ you have to understand what you’re doing, what you’ve been doing to me, I am not in control of my own reactions,  _ please _.  _

Nothing. Logan squeezed his eyes shut, clawing at the collar of his pajama shirt in a fruitless attempt to get more air, glasses slipping off his face. He’d slept with them on again. If he kept this up, they would surely bend or warp--

_ I have no guarantee he won’t report it anyway,  _ snapped his soulmate in his head,  _ who would believe a known liar, I bring up an accusation after the fact and I’m a vindictive future criminal, I bring it up before and he says I’m trying to ruin his credibility because I know I was caught, there is no version of this where I get away clean and not even a different  _ school _ will be enough. Irretrievably fucked, I am so fucked, Janus Ekans had a nice run but was shot down before he took his shot because Mr Everett  _ killed  _ him. _

_ Everett?  _ Logan demanded, but of course he didn’t wait for a response. He was throwing himself at his bookshelf instead, dragging out-- not a yearbook, not Feynman not Hawking but an expandable file folder, one he’d used in the last debate competition to hold his cases, refutations, flow charts-- and there, the judge for the second debate that past year,  _ Brian Everett.  _ A high school teacher. One who taught at a neighboring school, where Logan had once taken a practice PSAT. 

_ I don’t know what to do,  _ came his soulmate’s thoughts, cold and resigned.  _ Except the obvious, of course.  _

The name  _ Brian Everett  _ brought up over thirty Facebook profiles, only twenty-one spelling  _ Brian _ with an ‘ _ I’ _ . Logan added other search terms and found a faculty page, a mostly unused Twitter, a reference in an article about a state debate competition in Orlando. Logan remembered it, though his school had been eliminated before the final round. Had his soulmate been there? He wondered if Janus Ekans had gone further than Logan had, if they had once been in the same room.

_ I can be clever. _

“Obviously,” Logan muttered, then paused, surprised by the sound of his own voice. He hadn’t talked to himself aloud in some time. His voice was hoarser than he’d expected.

_ I’m not weak-willed or an idiot. If there’s really no other way-- _

_ There is another way,  _ Logan thought back pointlessly, and closed his laptop. He’d found social media profiles, images of the man’s backyard, lists of his Facebook friends. He had seen a woman refer to him as her neighbor, and had caught a picture of her address. He knew what Everett’s house looked like. And his soulmate’s thoughts had comprehensively ruled out the school as a location for Everett’s laptop. Not that the man wasn’t likely to have uploaded the information elsewhere, but--

Logan knew where he lived, and Everett seemed practiced enough at blackmail not to demand it through email or text. If that was the case, Janus may not have been the first target, and if  _ that  _ was the case…

Logan was not accustomed to taking action. He did well in school, showed himself to be intelligent and ambitious, and instructors fell over themselves to get him into tournaments and honor societies. He studied, nothing more. He was bright and going to go far and  _ completely inconsequential _ . 

He found himself in the unique situation of being the only one who  _ could _ act, now. Even if he’d had evidence of the blackmail, bringing it to the attention of law enforcement would result in Janus’s alleged cheating coming to light, only compounding his credibility problem-- and Logan, once revealed as his soulmate, would be called into question as well. 

His soulmate’s emotions had receded by now, letting Logan sink back against the bathroom cabinets and think. He knew where Brian Everett lived with relative certainty. His parents had basic tools, and Logan knew how to download or delete information. He knew Everett didn’t have a dog. 

It was, objectively, a terrible idea. Logan would risk his own future with such an action, even if he were egotistical enough to believe he could get away with breaking and entering with ease. He could ruin himself over this. He had never committed a crime before. 

The astronauts of the burgeoning space program had never left Earth’s orbit before, either. They hadn’t let it stop them. They had known the theory, and what better way to put it into practice, to protect his soulmate, to see if it  _ worked-- _

*

Logan took his bike to Everett’s neighborhood, then hid it in a culvert and pulled his hoodie over his head and his mask over his face, blinking against his contacts: glasses could reflect light. He wore soft sneakers, gloves, dark clothing; it was three twenty-two in the morning, in a wealthy neighborhood, and the only motion Logan could see was the faint twitch of palm leaves in the wind. 

Light pollution blocked most of the stars in the sky, but Logan could see the three specks that made up Orion’s belt, the blinking light of a plane. Someone’s sprinkler system was on, bathing the soil and sidewalk in glistening wet. The light at the end of the cul-de-sac was out. 

In the distance, a car howled by. Logan waited for the gleam of headlights, prepared to duck down or try to seem innocuous-- how he would seem innocuous loitering in a different neighborhood in the darkest hours of night, he had no idea-- but none appeared. 

His palms were sweating, and his chest felt tight. Brian Everett’s house loomed above him, silent with dark windows and a keypad on the door. 

_ Neil Armstrong. Buzz Aldrin.  _

Logan crept closer, noted the lack of cameras at the front door, the lack of a security company sign picketed on the front lawn. Brian Everett was divorced, and did not seem to have custody. His ex-wife was no longer his friend on Facebook, but her brother was. She lived with his children in Maine. 

_ Pete Conrad. Alan Bean. Alan Shepherd. _

There was a car in the driveway. 

Logan stepped around the side, tripping over an unspooled garden hose and falling to his side in the wet grass. A moth fluttered up from the weeds he landed on, so close to his face that he recoiled. He found a window by the side of the house, low enough to be climbed through; it was unlocked, cracked open to show a screen. Behind him, crickets began to chirp again. 

_ Edgar Mitchell, David Scott. _

Logan sliced through the screen horizontally, close to the bottom and around the edges, so it could be lifted in one large flap. He put his gloved fingers through the opening and strained to pull the window open, half-expecting it to be locked in position, but despite his bad leverage he achieved results. 

His soulmate’s terror kept echoing through his mind, even though the boy himself seemed to be asleep. That was-- good. It was good to avoid distraction. Like a surgery, burglary required precision. 

Clamber through the window, careful not to track mud onto the sill or the tile. Step softly, quietly, slowly. Survey the dark house for any organic shapes, for a kitchen, for the bedrooms and bathrooms. For a study. 

_ James Irwin, Charles Duke, John Young, Eugene Cernan. James, meaning  _ supplanter _. Charles, meaning  _ free man _. Eugene, meaning  _ well-born _ ,  _ and Logan had never found it so fascinating what legacies parents gave their children at birth--

One of the rooms at the front of the house had a desk and a laptop. Logan swallowed against a dry throat and stepped inside, grateful for the partially-open door. The laptop came out of sleep asking for a password, but Logan found a sticky note in the desk drawers with a few strings of words and numbers on it. The third string worked, once Logan took a cue from the others and added a question mark at the end.

The laptop screen glowed offensively white once it appeared. Logan glanced at the doorway for any signs that Everett had awakened, but the house remained silent. His heart beat in his ears. 

_ Harrison Schmitt,  _ Logan thought, and then he was out of astronauts who’d landed on the moon. It felt like being abandoned, in a way; like a shadow creeping steadily overhead to block out all remaining light. Like passing an event horizon into certain doom. 

_ What am I going to  _ do, his soulmate whispered in the back of his head, an insomniac refrain.  _ What am I going to do, what am I going to do, what am I going to do.  _

Logan wondered if his soulmate would ever realize how much of him came over the connection, when they both were aware of it-- if his soulmate had ever had to keep even his mind quiet, to focus only on what was necessary and discard the rest as distortion or sentiment. 

_ God god god I don’t know what to do-- _

_ I do,  _ Logan said, because he always did, he knew things, but his soulmate’s litany went on. The laptop had several file folders, more lesson plans than Logan would have expected, past debate cases and faculty emails. Logan found a folder labeled  _ Lesson Plans 2018,  _ remarkable because every other lesson plan was named after the specific focus, whether  _ Personal Essay Writing 1  _ or  _ Paradise ch. 4-8,  _ and opened it. 

His gorge rose, just slightly. Lewd photos, almost certainly of high school students, even more certainly taken under duress. Their expressions were not what Logan would have classified as  _ seductive _ . 

He recognized one of them as a past debate opponent, notable for his uncommon surname and cystic acne, and felt his hands tremble. Suddenly he wished to enter the master bedroom and strangle Everett, this man who thought he could get away with this, who should have been turned into the police but for what he still held over Janus’s head, likely over these students’ heads as well-- or why wouldn’t he have been reported already? 

Logan downloaded the information onto a USB drive, then scoured Everett’s emails for code words, sent emails, drafts, and came up with an email from a former student, informing Everett that he was joining the Peace Corps and going overseas. The wording was strange, almost hostile; the specification was that the student would no longer have access to the Internet. Everett did not seem to have responded. 

Soft, eerie calm. Logan removed the USB and pocketed it, then took a red pen from the desk and wrote on a piece of printer paper, altering his handwriting with rounder A’s and a lean to the right:  _ It has come to our attention that you intend to acquire another victim. We know about Glaser and Abalos, and have downloaded every photo you have of the students you have molested in the past. You will not go through with any plans you have or any blackmail you have acquired for any of your victims. If you do, we will go to the police with everything we know.  _

_ I assure you, we know a great deal. _

Logan took out a flashlight and swept the desk for stray hairs; then he drifted back into the hallway, past the kitchen, and climbed backwards out of the window, landing with a crunch on the soft grass. 

Back down the street, taking the first opportunity to drop into a culvert between backyard fences, cutting through a greenway, finding his bike. Logan had broken into a house and out again. He had threatened blackmail. He had gone into a computer and downloaded photos, which could very well incriminate him as well. 

Dew had started to settle over the grass, overlaying the harsh glow of the streetlights with a wet shimmer. Five thirty in the morning brought the first hints of sunrise, a border of diffuse pink light against the horizon, not yet visible through the canopy. Not yet morning, but on the cusp of it. A worse and brighter day. 

_ I’m so scared,  _ came Janus’s thoughts, weak and wondering.  _ I really do hate being scared. _

Logan swallowed his own fear and pulled out his bike, setting its wheels on the sidewalk. His fists fought to squeeze closed. He would have to watch carefully, to see if Janus was harassed again-- to see if he was accused of cheating despite Logan’s actions, or because of them. He would have to retaliate, if he was. 

_ I will not leave you alone,  _ he wanted to say, but unlike Janus he thought he had the skill of keeping his thoughts to himself, his mind secluded and discrete.  _ I think you may be the one person in the world I am of use to. _

And in the back of his head cried the refrain,  _ Houston, we’ve had a problem here, answer me, tell me you’re receiving, because you are not the only one who hates being scared.  _

_ (I’m scared, I’m scared, I don’t know what to do and who can I even  _ ask _ and--) _

_ This is Houston,  _ Logan threw out, wild with adrenaline and desperation,  _ say again, please-- _

And his soulmate, thoughts stuttering, almost imperceptible, echoed: 

_ Again. _

**Author's Note:**

> TW: implied sexual coercion (nothing happens to Janus or Logan, don't worry), blackmail by a teacher, coerced photos (nothing happens to Janus or Logan), crime, issues with self-worth and being ignored.


End file.
